15.19. Silverlight 4.0

At the time of writing, the first beta of Silverlight 4.0 has just been released. (I don't envy Silverlight authors; their books must have the shortest life span in the world.)

I have summarized some of the important changes here:

• Printing support (yay!)

• MEF support

• New controls: TextBox with hyperlink, masked TextBox, DataGrid with copy/paste functionality

• Webcam and microphone support

• Copy-and-paste functionality

• Mouse wheel support

• Google Chrome support

• Performance optimizations

• Multitouch support

• For trusted applications, read/write to documents folders, run other desktop programs (e.g., Microsoft Office suite)

• New interface for requesting more privileges for applications

• Localization enhancements (right-to-left text and complex scripts)

For more information, please refer to http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/.